Field of the Invention
The invention relates in general to an equalizer, and more particularly to an equalizing apparatus and a corresponding soft decision method.
Description of the Related Art
In general, an equalizer structure at a receiver of a conventional communication system adopts a hard decision mechanism, which determines which symbol a received signal is through a decision boundary and outputs a corresponding signal level. However, a hard decision mechanism suffers from certain severe drawbacks. For example, once a decision error occurs (e.g., due to excessive channel noise or multipath fading), a large amount of decision errors accumulated may undesirably affect subsequent decisions, leading to the overall system being prone to breakdown and instability.